Sherry F. Bellamy

Sherry F. Bellamy is a Partner at Leftwich & Ludaway LLC, with a focus on litigation, internal investigations and regulatory matters. She also serves as Vice President of L&L Consulting LLC, an affiliate of the law firm, specializing in management consulting and change management. She is a member of the Bar in Connecticut, New York and the District of Columbia. Ms. Bellamy holds a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School and a Bachelor of Arts from Swarthmore College.

Ms. Bellamy retired in 2009 as Vice President and Deputy General Counsel for Verizon Business, where she oversaw litigation and regulatory matters for Verizon’s enterprise and government sales division. At Verizon Communications, she served in a variety of roles with increasing responsibility, including President and Chief Executive Officer of Verizon’s Maryland subsidiary, a role in which she represented the company’s interests in both regulatory and legislative matters as the company evolved from a monopoly telephone company into a competitive telecom provider.

Ms. Bellamy’s service at Verizon included being part of the merger approval teams on the company’s three foundational mergers – Nynex/ Bell Atlantic, Bell Atlantic/GTE and Verizon/MCI. She served as second chair for the antitrust review of the Bell Atlantic-NYNEX merger, as an expert witness in the GTE merger, and as the lead lawyer for state regulatory approvals when Verizon acquired MCI. During a nearly 20 year tenure at Verizon, Sherry served as Vice President and Associate General Counsel, overseeing the state general counsels in New England, New York and the Mid-Atlantic, and prior to that served as Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary for C&P Telephone, the Washington DC operating subsidiary.

Ms. Bellamy has extensive experience with philanthropic board service, presently serving as a trustee for Johns Hopkins Medicine, where she is a member of the JHHS Audit, Compliance and Insurance Committee, and the External Affairs Committee. She is also Vice Chair of the Board of Directors of the Atlas Performing Arts Center in Washington, D.C. and a member of the Board of Directors of Cardinal Spellman High School, her alma mater, in New York City. Her prior board service includes serving as a director and Executive Committee member of the Maryland Economic Development Commission, the Greater Baltimore Committee, the Greater Baltimore Alliance and the Maryland State Chamber of Commerce. She also served on the Board of Managers of Swarthmore College, her alma mater.

Ms. Bellamy is a member of the DirectWomen Board Institute Class of 2011, a program designed to identify and promote an elite group of exceptional senior women lawyers for service as directors of major U.S. corporations.

Ms. Bellamy has been recognized by the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession for her contributions to advancing the cause of diversity in the legal profession. Other awards and honors include an Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from Rosemont College, being named as one of Maryland’s Top 100 Women, Baltimore Magazine’s Top Women in Business and Washingtonian Magazine’s Most Powerful Women in Washington. Ms. Bellamy has been profiled in two books, Women of Courage II and Notable Black American Women III, as well as in numerous newspaper and magazine articles.

Before joining Verizon, Ms. Bellamy held positions with large law firms in both Washington, D.C. and New York City, specializing in litigation and regulatory matters. Early in her career, she served as a staff attorney at a legal services program.